News reaches us this week, from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them director David Yates, that the next film in the Harry Potter spin-off will not “explicitly” mention the gayness of Hogwarts honcho Albus Dumbledore. This is an exciting development for keen followers of the wizard’s constantly evolving sexuality. The first step in the fictional magician’s journey came in 2007, when, after writing a series of seven books that never mentioned Dumbledore fancying anyone at all, JK Rowling delighted an audience of Potterheads by “revealing” that he was gay. Quite how somebody is supposed to be gay without it ever being said, written or observed is for greater minds than mine to fathom, but this apparently throwaway comment duly entered Potter lore.

Time-travel ahead 11 years, and David Yates finds himself making Fantastic Beasts 2, the entire point of which is that it’s about Gellert Grindelwald, whom Rowling had said (but not written) that Dumbledore was in love with. So the film-makers of this Potter-adjacent franchise that nobody had foreseen are in a spot of bother, since for obvious reasons it would be politically and financially savvy if the new films could also somehow get away with him being gay while never stating it, like the seven books and eight films we’ve already had. That’s the thing with coming out, or being an ally: you might actually have to run the risk of taking some sort of personal hit, or having to stand up for yourself.

Spot of bother … the cast of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, with Jude Law as Dumbledore (far left) and Johnyy Depp as Grindelwald (far right). Photograph: Warner Bros

This refrain isn’t new, and JK Rowling is not the sole proprietor of a series that wants to be seen to be doing the right thing while saving its own hide. In October of last year, Tessa Thompson tweeted that the bisexuality of Valkyrie would not be “explicitly addressed” in Thor: Ragnarok, but that she had tried to “stay faithful to that in [her] depiction”. The consensus is that it makes no difference whatsoever in the way Valkyrie kicks ass or utters dialogue. But, once again: if a character is not described as black, or gay, or deaf, or very old, the reader or viewer cannot be asked to accept that they are such. The whole point of being in a minority is that your characteristics describe you; your whole identity is marked out by difference, or opposition.

Why Dumbledore must not be the token gay person in Fantastic Beasts

Read more

It’s easy to be flip about this trend if you aren’t invested in the films concerned. The mooted but never beheld sexuality of Dumbledore, like the Loch Ness monster, is personally hilarious to me – but I don’t belong to a generation that grew up on Potter books. For many young people, the subject of seeing themselves represented in some manner in the universe they love is of deeply felt importance, as can be seen in the many replies to JK Rowling’s responsibility-shirking tweets on the matter.

Studios are beginning to cotton on, albeit with painful slowness, to the idea that alternative sexualities and genders are here to stay, and that their young audiences now have evolved views on representation in movies. The new Star Wars films are doing well with racial representation, fielding increasingly diverse casts, but the one romantic pairing absolutely everybody wants to see from the movies – namely, a hot interstellar make-out sesh between Finn and Poe – has still not materialised. Still, the Star Trek films have got in on the act – however tentatively – and Beauty and the Beast, which made $1.25bn at the box office last year, featured a homosexual moment that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described as “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it”. Meanwhile, Deadpool is purportedly pansexual and Ezra Miller is the first openly queer lead actor in a superhero franchise (although he revealed last year that studio execs told him he had made a mistake in coming out).

Perhaps future Potter-related films will course-correct, and Dumbledore will finally be allowed to blossom into the homosexual man he has apparently been all along. Perhaps these early skirmishes about sexuality and representation will come to seem berserk to future generations, who will be baffled that Rowling’s characters, being magical creations in an alternative universe, needed to be gendered at all or have a circumscribed sexual bent in the first place. For now, we anxiously await a new development in Dumbledore’s storied sexuality saga.